Father's figure

Many of the self help group people advise to believe in a Higher Power. Have faith. The Higher Power loves you. And it may be true.
It's just this blind act of having faith that I don't trust. I had faith before, in the greatness of the Higher Power. Look where it got me: my father abused me and told me I was a sinner.
Incidentally, my father believes in a Higher Power. He goes to church every Sunday, he fasts and he keeps every Christian holiday as if it were his last.
Now, forgive me if I don't care to worship the same Higher Power that he worships. I look like my father and I hate those biological traits that I share with him. All my life I wanted to be so different from him, to convince myself that him and I have nothing in common. I evolved as a species, I got smarter, I refuse to have anything in common with that man. Yet, every time I look in the mirror, I remember him. I am his daughter. I am trapped. In hell. With my father. And a long time ago, I desperately wanted him to love me and stop hurting me. Why is this Higher Power so cruel? Where do I find the strength to have that blind faith? I have fear, not faith. I have fear of my father. I have fear that other "worthy" men, may hurt me. I have fear that this Higher Power is as elusive as the love I never received from my father. I can't have faith. Too busy defending myself. Am I becoming like my father in that respect?
Because all of us are worthy in the eyes of the higher power. Even my father. Is there a chance that my soul will meet his again? I hope not. His soul sucks.

worth

She said: "It boils down to: you have a right to exist!"...
Then, she continued to enumerate ways in which I should love myself every day. She told me I should take care of myself, be attentive to my needs and concluded with: "You are worthy!"
Powerful words: I'm worthy!
The only problem with these words is that: I don't know what they mean. Worthy of what? On what scale of things? Am I worthier than a criminal or a normal person? Does my past entitles me to some life goods that I am not aware of? Or are we all equally worthy, just in different ways?
I give a lot of attention to myself, ever since I started working on my emotionally crippled soul. I fear that all the love I can give myself, will never replace the love I don't receive from others. What do I expect from others, anyway? What does it feel like to be loved/accepted? Does it feel like ice cream on a hot day, or does it feel as overwhelming as hate, only in the positive way? Ultimately, aren't we all looking for love, abused or normal people? Aren't we, the abused ones, competing for love with the normal people?
A lot of anger and hate came out of me lately and sometimes I fear I could never offer anything in return for love. I also fear that people could realize how mean I can be, with my snappy come backs ( that, I personally think, are hilarious). I don't know how to fit in my victim past with my day to day functional self. There are many gaps in my personality. One moment I can be invincible, and the next I could crumble into pieces, because most of life is new to me. I'm living everything for the first time. With emotions. Much like a baby, it feels like I was born yesterday. My fragile self mixes in with the survivor self, who knows how to pull through hard times and is too wise for its own good.

Seraphine

Just finished watching a little French indie, called Seraphine. No major director, no big actors, just a well acted pseudobiopic.
It is the story of a simple minded, uneducated woman painter, at the beginning of the 20th century. A highly educated and intuitive art dealer discovers her in her natural habitat and offers her a chance of a lifetime. She, however, is and erratic soul, with little grip on the daily realities. The detail of this character impressed me. The actress who played the part (Yolande Moreau), had an honest descent into this woman's soul. She portrays Seraphine, as if she knew her personally. There are nuances like her relationship with the divinity, her lack of sexuality, her overwhelming talent, that didn't leave any space for anything else to form inside her personality. These nuances are expressed through song, facial expressions and continuity of gestures that are rare to observe in the acting craft. Nowadays, when films are taken over by pretty faces and short lines, to see such richness of character, is a treat.
I was moved. I understood what she meant, when she talked about painting as a force that overtakes her life. Yolande Moreau is such a fine artist that she communicated to me (the untrained spectator), what the life and mind of Seraphine must have been like.
The imdb profile is here

the band aid man

You know how sometime you cut your finger and it hurts and you put a bugs bunny band aid on the wound and just because the band aid is there, you feel like your life is going to be OK? The same goes for relationships.
I had a band aid man. He was the Mother Theresa of emotional invalids. His patience took that one step further and made me wonder if he ever had any need, or if he ever lost his temper over anything. His family taught him endurance. They never expressed big emotions. It was not dignified. Repression was the healthiest emotional exercise in their household.
I walked into his life like a hurricane. I had emotions pulling me in every possible direction, with no map. He looked at me, completely fascinated. He stayed with me, trying to secretly mimic emotions he never even knew existed. He started expressing his repressed anger in traffic. He would giggle apologetically immediately afterwards. He was not comfortable with showing emotion, yet that was everything his soul craved for. The craving turned into addiction. The addiction turned into repetitive behavior.
One day, he told me we should get married. Since most of my emotional insights are fairly short sighted when it comes to commitment, I thought about it. I thought about what it would mean us being married. It couldn't possibly change much from what we had up until then. We lived together, in a purple apartment, I liked to call "my purple egg". I did laundry every week, hand washing or soaking the soiled stuff. I cleaned the house with baking soda, which makes for a miracle ecological detergent. I waxed the floors, without ever getting the hang of it, really. I ironed sheets and shirts. I cooked fabulously complicated meals, when I felt inspired and shopped for organic produce at local farmer's markets. Life was bliss in that day by day routine, that somehow establishes a rhythm. My heart tuned to this rhythm and chaos became lighter and easier to navigate. I've decided I was going to have as life goal: to be boring, to take no chances, no risks, just be, in that rhythm that my heart learned. No plans for the future, no master schemes. For once I'd trust life to be in control. But where would "us being married" fit in this picture? Were we already playing married and just needed to seal the deal? Were we two random souls, united for a while? Were we meant to be together? What does "meant to be together" mean? What does it feel like? Would it be fair of me to marry "the band aid man"?

thought vs feel

Where does sadness come from? When does it end? Any film, any sappy line, any retarded happy ending, any melodramatic innuendo has the same effect on me like the death of a dear person. My hard earned intellectual capacities don't allow me to panic. I feel and I judge myself at the same time. I feel and I'm ashamed of myself for feeling. It's as if I let myself down. It's as if the intellectual in me would tell the emotional self: "You're an idiot. Your behavior is shameful and you know better than that. How dare you feel, when you've got me, the intellectual who can shortcut feelings and think instead." It's as if the intellectual self is afraid to be irrelevant and eventually replaced, if the emotional self would take over.
I feel a desperate need to cry and not a tear comes out. I think about the sad stories of my past. I remember how I decided to take care of myself, when I felt rejected and forgotten by the entire world starting with my parents. I needed comfort and there was no one to provide and I hugged myself. I promised myself to hug and soothe myself any time I needed to, but myself became a lonely place. As years go by, I feel like ripping through myself and see what's out there, let others hug me. Problem is: I can't tell the good hug from the bad hug. Nobody taught me how to discern.
Thought vs Feel is my conflict. How to resolve it? How to make myself big enough to contain both without inhibiting each other? How can I have both function at the same time?

Inner child

My inner child is a runt, looks more like a zombie than a human being and bites every chance she gets. She's a little scared animal. If I respond with kindness, she'll just start crying and she cries rivers of sadness, of loneliness and despair.
I considered abandoning my inner child and never looking back. In a cowardly moment, I considered forgetting the abuse voluntarily, yet again, only this time for good. Many times, while talking to people, I find myself being needy, pathetic and miserable, in an effort to make sense out of what happened to me. It's as if I want someone else to confirm the injustice I've lived and validate my sorrow. My inner child, the keeper of these feelings of hate, anger, sorrow, sadness, tries to communicate through me and ask for help. She's barking at the wrong tree. Maybe I should continue therapy, but therapy is not enough for me. It's too organized and I never get to connect with my deeper self during those 45 minutes. Groups are retarded, cause everything I'll say is overly validated. It's like the blind leading the blind and it creates more confusion, than actual healing. Plus, too many women have too many things to say and it's a total downer. If you didn't feel suicidal at the beginning of the group, you'll be feeling suicidal by the end of it.
So, all I got left is this blog, where I can be pathetic, miserable, needy in the safety of my own inner world.
I can't give up on my inner child, she's also the keeper of my creativity and genius ideas. All of those shiny years of pure bliss, when I couldn't feel any other emotion, because my memory locked away any trace of abuse, I could never create. I couldn't write, I couldn't paint, I couldn't act. I must continue this relationship and bring that runt of a child back to health, if I want to keep creating.

Tower of Babel

It's not that I hate my family. I just can't seem to communicate with them. It's as if certain words had different meanings for each of us.
I recently travelled to my home country, the one I left many years ago, at dawn, promising myself to never look back.
The return has been emotional, but not overwhelming. I saw people and places that I knew. It was weird to revisit places where I have been brutally abused and tortured for many years, praying to God for survival. It was like visiting Auschwitz, the concentration camp, with its grim records of death and horror. Green grass has grown over those places, nature has continued its course, people smile and the sun is shinning. Nothing would reveal the atrocity I had known, the despair and malfunctioning of several families. Nothing told the story of humiliation, shame, neglect and rejection I and a few other kids suffered at the hands of my father, uncle and a few other "good men". I realized the abuse is a place in time, not in space.
I refused to see my alcoholic, pedophile father, although my enabler mother tried to convince me he stopped drinking and lost a lot of weight cause he thinks about the past. My cousin, on the other hand told me she saw him at my aunt's house and he started drinking at 3am and fought a fence by noon. Who to believe?
I also met a few zealot Christians, who preached me the love of God threatening to stab me with the cross if I refused to receive salvation. My father is also a fervent Christian and never thought twice about raping me since the age of three. See my side of the argument?
Also, speaking with certain members of my extended family, who seem to have known about the going ons of the pedophilia and such, I realized that they all more or less knew. They all judged me at some point or another, yet neither of them did anything to save me. Neither of them tried to talk to me, be my friend. It would have been enough if I had gotten a shoulder to cry on, it would have been enough to know I could talk to someone. All of them pointed fingers at me: I was the damaged, no hope child. They pitied me, yet never hugged me. Never hug a leper, I guess. All Christians, ready to preach about Jesus and regurgitate Bible verses at the drop of a hat.
Many of them were curious to hear about my life. I received a lot of attention. Too little, too late. It's as if they were saying: you turned out alright; who would have thunk, a runt of a child, like yourself?
Again, it's not that I hate my family, it's just that communication is not there. They all care now, when I don't need them anymore. They all remembered me for once.